Index Morganagus, Easter report

[Eric Lease Morgan]

:

             Index Morganagus, Easter report
     
     This report briefly evaluates the usefulness Index
     Morganagus, the index of library-related electronic
     serials at:
     
     http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~emorgan/morganagus/
     
     This report can be found at:
     
     http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~emorgan/morganagus/
     survey-results/report-easter.html
     
      
     Service extended
     
     When the Index was introduced in late December, a time
     limit evaluation period was placed on the service,
     Easter. It is almost Easter and it has been decided to
     extend the evauation period until Labor Day (September
     2) of this year. At that time the usefulness of the
     service will be re-evaluated and a decision will be
     made whether or not to continue.
     
     
     Lots of statistics
     
     Computer services are great for generating lots of
     data. The Index is no exception. HTTP server logs have
     been kept and analysed, as well as Harvest queries, and
     survey results.
     
     Survey results
     
     In an attempt to get feedback, a survey was created.
     Most of the people answering the survey were academic
     librarians. Most people felt the Index was "useful" or
     "somewhat useful". To most people the Index returned
     the expected results and would like to see the Index
     continue. Pie charts illustrating the survey results
     are available online.
     
     The public comments and anonymous comments were very
     interesting to read. Most of them liked the service but
     were wondering whether or not the layout of the search
     results could be improved.
     
     Desite the fact that the Index has been searched at
     least 3,000 times, only 100 surveys have been recived.
     Why? How is a person expected to improve a service if
     there is no feedback?
     
     Types of searches
     
     To date, the Index has services 3,123 queries broken
     down into the following types:
     
          Phrase          766
          Truncation      138
          Logical AND    2005
          Logical OR       96
          Compound         67
          Field            34
          Single term    1479
          Total searches 3123
     
     Based on this data, and a look at the searches
     themselves, it is evident people are using single terms
     or non-quoted phrases as their primary means of
     searching the Index. This is unfortunate becuase
     Harvest provides quite robust searching syntax
     including field searching, truncation, compound
     searches, and truncation.
     
     Put another way, despite the fact that most of the
     people using the Index are librarians and expected to
     be expert searchers, the librarians are not taking full
     advantage of the Index's capabilities. Since the Index
     creates logical AND queries by default, and this stated
     clearly in the instructions, many queries returned
     inexact results. Example queries include:
     
        * public AND libraries AND management AND finance
        * flexible AND scheduling
        * executive AND board AND room AND table AND designs
        * electronic AND citations
        * digital and library and finance
     
     
     Automated indexing
     
     We are happy to report that maintenance of the Index
     has bee rather painless after its original
     implementation and construction of cron-based shell
     scripts. The Index refreshes itself every two weeks
     without incident. Its almost "automagtic!" The creation
     of the FileMaker Pro database has also been a boon
     making simplifying the process of updating the index.
     
     
     Future directions
     
     Things are changing on the 'Net and the version of
     Harvest being used for the Index must be updated to
     interpret HTML 3.2 and HTTP 1.1. Another addition is
     the ability to interpret PDF files for indexing.
     
     The Index is not perfect. One problem that was brought
     to attention was poor indexing of the Newsletter on
     Serial Pricing Issues. This conical site for this
     serial was being indexinged by Harvest but returning
     incorrect results. Why this was happening was not
     discovered. Instead, a different archive of the serial
     is being used and search results are now correct.
     
     Another opportunity it to join the Index with other
     Harvest index around the 'Net to essencially create the
     Internet equivelant of Academic Index. This is still
     the primary goal of the entire project, but first some
     of the interface bugs need to be worked out.
     
     
-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
NCSU Libraries
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/morgan/